Word: alchemists
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...could a firm long heralded for its go-go brilliance stumble so badly? Somehow the company that transformed the advertising industry worldwide during the 1980s seems to have lost its alchemist's touch. Deepening the management mystery, Saatchi & Saatchi profits fell while its global advertising business continued to thrive: the company's revenues reached $1.5 billion this year, up from $1.35 billion...
Grooms is best when some menace is allowed to peep through the bonhomie, just as he is worst when he is most folksy. The Woolworth Building, leaning forward as though to resist some invisible gale, with old Frank Woolworth huddled like a crazed alchemist in its tower and a dragon made of dollar bills (the Spirit of Capitalism -- geddit?) waving its creaking neck from the roof, is quite a creation. But either way, one has the sense of an exaggerated rube's-eye view willfully prolonged. It reminds one that however "elitist" economy and wit may seem, vulgarity soon palls...
...work on view ranges from Symbolists like Paul Serusier to gifted postmodernists like Bruno Ceccobelli; from mannered Rosicrucians and a little- known visionary named Hilma af Klint to Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jasper Johns. Nor does it leave out that durable old alchemist, Marcel Duchamp. It also features several vitrines of early mystical, cosmological and alchemical texts known to have been studied by modern artists, some of whose illustrations are of astonishing beauty and suggestiveness. But its main focus, inevitably, is on the inventors of abstract art: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, Kazimir Malevich -- all represented by remarkable works...
...brought news no longer frightens people into a sense of personal powerlessness. Marx has been discredited in public as the prophet of a future that works only at the expense of human self-regard. Freud one either takes or leaves: your age may think him a brilliant curiosity, an alchemist with style. In different ways, all three helped to persuade several generations that fate either was not in their hands or existed only in the form of a collective. Now, suddenly, you will find intellectuals paying lip service to powerlessness as a sort of homage to an old complaint...
...perpetual motion. In the book Maxwell's model is used by a California therapy guru, fictionalized as Dr. Klaus Woofner, to explain human behavior. Kesey the globe trotter and spiritual joker seems entranced. But Kesey the planter of corn and milker of cows presents Woofner as another psycho-alchemist trying to turn a metaphor into a 14-karat gimmick. The point is made admiringly by one skilled fancifier to another. After all, the charlatan, like the artist, exploits illusion and a sense of mystery. Behind the plow or on the road, this has always been a risky business. The author...